For Dallas Cowboys fans gathered at Cosm, a new sports venue just north of Dallas, the climax of the Nov. 24 National Football League game against the Washington Commanders delivered a heart-attack-worthy spectacle.
Both teams were muddling through a 10-9 game until the fourth quarter, when a series of unlikely events turned things upside down. In the final stretch, the two offenses exploded for a collective 31 points. With less than a minute left and all the mojo behind them, the Commanders sneezed on an extra-point kick that would have tied the game. Then Washington surrendered a touchdown on the subsequent kickoff, sealing their fate in a 34-26 loss at their home field at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland.
Cowboys fans all over the planet witnessed the same bewildering victory on TV. But few Dallas die-hards had better seats for this shocking turnabout than those watching at Cosm, an immersive sports theater that opened in August in The Colony, a north Dallas suburb. Hundreds of fans gathered inside the facility’s cavernous dome to watch a Sunday stunner on a concave three-story screen — an experience immense and vivid enough to be lifelike.
Fourth-and-inches hits different when the screen is so large that a fraction of a yard is rendered at full scale. Like a demi-sized version of Sphere, the space-age entertainment venue that opened in Las Vegas last year, Cosm uses streaming technology and vast curving LED screens to deliver views that rival the best seats in arenas, ballparks and stadiums around the world. With outposts in Los Angeles and Dallas and more on the way — including a development set to break ground in downtown Detroit in 2025 — Cosm hopes to provide a destination experience for sports nuts that doubles as a neighborhood anchor.
Think a planetarium that serves lemon-pepper wings — or a Sphere squeezed into a local game-day haunt. Watching glum Commanders fans file out of the stands in crisp 8K video at Cosm Dallas convinced me. I laughed at Immersive Van Gogh; I wept at Immersive Micah Parsons.
“We will never recreate the stadium experience. Or ever even aspire to beat that,” says Jeb Terry, president and chief executive officer of Cosm and a former offensive lineman in the NFL. “There is nothing like being in a big game — there’s just something about the electricity in the room. But we want to offer the next best thing.”
Cosm aims to create a new category of spectator experience, something in between getting together with friends at a sports bar and splurging on tickets to attend a live game. With backing from RealPage Inc. founder Steve Winn and Mirasol Capital, plus a $250 million round of funding this summer, the company is targeting US markets with multiple local pro teams and passionate (often overlapping) fanbases. To that end, Cosm has partnerships with every major professional sports league in the country, as well as Premier League soccer, Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts, Cirque De Soleil and other events.
For that Cowboys game, a booth for three people front-and-center inside the dome at Cosm Dallas cost $300 — less than the average price for a single ticket across the city at AT&T Stadium — with standing-room tickets going for a fraction of that. Besides games and performances, Cosm features shorter immersive experiences that showcase the company’s technology.
So far the company has planted these sprawling mega-theaters in the suburbs: The 65,000-square-foot (6,000-square-meter) Cosm Los Angeles opened in June in Inglewood, a stone’s throw from SoFi Stadium but a half-hour’s drive from downtown LA. Cosm Dallas is even farther from its core city. Both were designed by the architectural firm HKS with a futuristic finish. The 70,000-square-foot facility near Dallas looks like a big-box retailer that might sell you a Cybertruck. It’s one of several entertainment options at Grandscape, a massive new 400-acre mixed-use development in The Colony. (My cousin in Dallas assures me it’s fun for singles.)
New Cosm locations in Atlanta and Detroit will test whether this model can thrive in a more urban environment. Cosm Detroit will serve as the anchor for a 1.5 million-square-foot development from the real estate firm Bedrock Detroit in historic Cadillac Square. Kofi Bonner, the CEO of Bedrock, says that Cosm Detroit will drive the ongoing revival of the Woodward Avenue corridor and help to cement the Paradise Valley neighborhood as a nightlife district. “It’s a unique entertainment concept that doesn’t exist in the market,” Bonner says.
To chart its future expansions in the US, Cosm is weighing a complicated matrix of real estate plays, sports fandoms and metro populations. It will need to pass several tests: as an immersive tech company, as a development partner and as a favorite local option for regulars.
The company’s name, which is meant to evoke both “cosmos” and “coliseum,” hints at its history. Cosm launched in 2019 and embarked on a series of acquisitions, starting in 2020 with Evans and Sutherland, a computer graphics firm whose digital projection technology powers planetariums. In the same year the company acquired Spitz, a manufacturer of domes and projection screens, as well as LiveLike VR, an immersive tech company. Cosm built its first prototype LED dome in Los Angeles as a vertically integrated company.
“All the partners said, ‘You sound kind of crazy,’” says Terry, who previously worked as a vice president for emerging technology at Fox Sports. “We felt justified to build out the infrastructure to scale. The early prototype was proven enough that we felt like we could take it out full stack.”
Here’s how Cosm works: For live events, the company sets up four or five cameras at the venue, shooting in 8K and even up to 10.5K resolution. Those feeds are produced remotely by technical directors in LA, then aired to Cosm venues on a delay to match the television broadcast. The producers use the 3D computer graphics platform Unreal Engine and other tools to add enhancements: When the Cowboys score, the team’s iconic blue star lights up the ceiling and virtual banners unfurl throughout Cosm Dallas. Broadcast partners provide the play-by-play; servers bring the wings.
“We’re just touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of accompanying graphics and storytelling,” says Devin Poolman, chief product and technology officer for Cosm.
The model is built around an insight that Cosm execs refer to as “shared reality.” The thinking is that that sports fans will never watch a game through a virtual reality headset — no matter how vivid the graphics — because it takes people away from the collective joy and suffering that unite sports fans. You can’t turn and slap your friend sitting next to you when a ref throws a bogus penalty flag if you’re both wearing dorky VR goggles. “You put it on your face for five minutes, and then you take it off, because you want to hang out in the real world,” Poolman says.
Simulating a live game experience is a high bar to clear, however. Broadcast television has not entirely figured it out: There’s a rhythm to a baseball game at a ballpark that’s impossible to capture via TV. Instead of trying to recreate either the televised or live perspective, Cosm strives for a third way. For the Cowboys game, the venue rotated between a handful of static cameras — on the 50-yard line, for example, or just underneath the goal posts in the end zone — while also offering inset game feeds.
As a viewer, it’s like having really (really) good seats, then occasionally shifting to some other good seats, but always with a view of the overall scene via the in-stadium display. The detail is incredibly lifelike: During the Cowboys game, I felt like I was sitting in a sea of burgundy and gold in the DC suburbs. During a pause in play, my game-watching partner spotted a kid chugging his dad’s beer after he left his seat. The fans sitting next to me (in real life) pointed out a group of people wearing Cowboys colors at the Commanders stadium and shouted “kinfolk!”
The best seats at Cosm are the booths within the dome, and those command a higher premium. Cheaper seats are available in the hall, which offers wall-to-wall LED screens showing the game and standing-room views of the dome. Cosm also offers an outdoor terrace deck: great for events in warmer weather or for the fan who needs a break from the on-field action (as all Cowboys fans eventually do).
The Cosm experience has its occasional hiccups: During the first quarter of the ’Boys game, the screen had to be restarted, leaving fans under the dome with a view of a 60-by-86-foot screen in dark mode. The glitch lasted only a few minutes, and Terry says that it doesn’t happen regularly, but it’s the kind of thing that could bring a bachelor party to a halt during a pivotal moment in the final seconds of a Mavs game.
Another challenge is making a facility as vast as Cosm warm and welcoming enough to draw fans out from their beloved local watering holes. The hall at Cosm Dallas can fit 800 people, large enough to feel infrastructural, like the interior of a real stadium. That’s less of a concern, perhaps, for an instant city like Grandscape in The Colony, where Cosm really is the local option. But it’s a factor that the Detroit architecture firm Rossetti is taking to heart with Cosm Detroit, which will occupy a downtown parcel between a skyscraper built in 1927 and a separate new project.
